Morris Raab

More doodles for the week

2011-12-03T03:14:00.001-08:00

Forced myself to sit down and do something. Of the scribbles for the week, these are the only four I didn't delete. No particular reason, these were just fun to do so I kept them.

Not putting in enough time currently.

Just Two Digital Doodles

2011-11-10T23:17:00.001-08:00

First, an on/off evening with Autodesk's Sketchbook Pro:

Not a bad app by any means, but everything seems destined to resemble a sketchbook (the name is very literal) with markers and ballpoint pens. The paintbrush will probably resemble gouache when I get used to it since this app seems to rest between a random doodling app and something a designer/student would use to avoid spending hundreds of dollars on Prismacolor pens. Haven't spent much time with it so I'm on the fence about how much I like it.

Entry to a Halloween themed contest:

Won a $15 video game for a few hours of work last Friday when I realized the deadline was coming up fast (0100 PDT/1900 AEST, unless they do daylight savings). I still have major issues drawing curved lines that don't wobble (as in I can't) on my tablet, but that's just part of the game due to the mostly frictionless surface. Instead of blue shadows smudged, I wish I'd instead just mixed a darker color and done it with a hard edge since this method here isn't working out for me.

Springish Round-Up

2011-09-19T16:45:00.000-07:00

As I was posting the last one Saturday night/Sunday morning, I remembered these scans I still hadn't posted. So, yea, I never could decide about whether or not I should make a group posting of the older drawings of single posts with some backstory over what I did. Now enough time has passed that I can't even recall what those drawings were without looking at my scans folder, and to make it worse I've posted a few times since. So, just gotta toss them out there and move on.

Just wanted to draw someone puking.

This was caused by reading either an article or diatribe (I forget which now) about anthropomorphic animals pre-dating the current furry culture.

Started as a salaryman who didn't care as the world broke around him, became a man frozen in time invincible to the influces, then became a frozen-time frame. I should have written down my ideas in a quick checklist first so they all could be integrated.

Quicky doodle with pencil and a Tombo calligraphy pen because all my drawings at the time had no sense of motion. Ended up really liking this due to how it compared to everything else I drew that night.

Really like these masks, and didn't use a source image. I need to double-check my pencil work more before jumping to ink.

Friend of mine has been requesting a drunken leprechaun for a while. Forgetting what one looks like, I drew a drunken, homeless dwarf and had to be reminded about the extra buckles, red hair, and mutton chops. Good warm-up though.

There you have it. A handful of drawings I did on the side I did mean to post, but for various reasons didn't think they deserved their own posting or flat-out forgot to.

Who's Hungry?

2011-09-18T04:34:00.000-07:00

Had a large blank file open (1200x1000 or 1500x1500, forget which) and was just messing around with Painter's pencil tools as usual. This giant tablet is a sketchpad that I occasionally use for coloring. Point being that this spawned from one of my several tiny doodles I had kicking around.

As for the drawing, I'm still hazy about pen tools when it comes to digital works. The hard edge is always too much for me no matter what I do, though I'd like to think I'm getting better at it, maybe I'm just getting used to it. Didn't have a clear intent when I started this, not even a colorset in mind. Also, despite my love of reds, I'm red/green colorblind and have no idea what this actually looks like... I hope it's somewhat close to how I'm perceiving it.

Beanstalks

2011-08-12T18:44:00.000-07:00

A friend looking over my sketchpad noted I was sorely lacking in drawing scenery and environment and challenged me to draw a sci-fi scene. Promptly I went over a mental checklist of sci-fi novel stereotypes and came up with the standard orbital elevator, which he informed me is more commonly known as a "beanstalk".

The drawing itself was a bit sloppy, and you can see the loose doodles behind it. But all the while I drew it, I kept imagining a bunch of blue. Dunno why, just seemed a a way to do it. The execution of digitally painting it blue however did necessarily go as planned on all fronts, but a stepping stone is a stepping stone.

I'm sure I could tweak it more, but I've spent enough hours re-re-repainting it to figure out what I had in mind as I moved along. It hit that point where one needs to take notes of what did and didn't work, and the project must be set aside.

Also, I'm not sure if it's my colorblindness or not, but goofing off with the overlay (a layer of pure orange to dim the intense blue) I found that I actually did like the inverting one, even if it wasn't what I had intended.

Sketchbooks...

2011-07-13T19:24:00.000-07:00

Nothing like finding filled and discarded sketchbooks lying around, quickly flipping through them for shits 'n giggles and seeing drawings that you thought you scanned.

Now, these are generally ones I never liked all that much or didn't think I'd finished, but they were still post-worthy. Will have to bring out the scanner later tonight or tomorrow when I'm done straightening up my room into a state I can work in.

How a Damn Rookie Builds a MAME Cabinet

2011-07-13T05:02:00.001-07:00

This is another post that doesn't really belong here, but I'm not sure where else to put it. I'll stick to mostly posting the pictures and keeping the text short.

First pic, 2001.05.12 @0159

This is after I removed all of the buttons it came with. Later I wiped them down and checked all the microswitches. One needed replacement and another I broke while moving things around. As of yesterday (2011.07.12) the move-right microswitch on P1 is starting to act up too and may need replacement as well. The rest all came with it.

The loose wires and microswitches. All Cherry D-somethings and nice, so I'll need to find a source for them since the generic $2 ones from Fry's are stiff and not good for SMHUP games. Also note the chunk of damage on the right side.

Masking tape, paper towel, denatured alcohol. Trying to find out what's behind it.

At the time I had no idea what this was, though a few images down you'll be able to tell.

It's an old Dig Dug cabinet. But the decals are damaged and there's water damage here and there, so as you can see I already gave up saving it and started scraping off two layers of crappy plastic enamel/acrylic (not sure which actually), a black on top and a blue underneath.

Nearly done stripping off the paint and damaged decal. You might not be able to tell, but the particle board didn't take to scraping well and some chunks and gougesjust came out of it as I removed everything. While I blame the weak, old, and water damaged particle board, it's just as likely a rookie mistake.

Spackle and watercolor so it wouldn't have white marks underneath the black paint. While this wasn't a bad idea, I relied too much on spackle and am paying for it now. Later on in Something Awful thread on MAME/arcade cabs I learned that I should have used Bondo. So more rookie mistakes are ahead.

Damaged this part moving it around. Spackle and marine grade epoxy from Tap Plastic. When picking up the cabinet from a guy in Napa, both were suggested soaking the damaged parts in epoxy, using the loose wood fibers in the stead of fiberglass or the like that would normally be used. This worked really well as far as I'm aware to far. Only thing keeping the spackle I used from blowing away in the wind... *sigh*

The original major damage before I banged it up moving it around and further damaged weak parts that didn't look as weak as they actually were.

Last production pic, 2011.05.27 @1726

More spackle, and on top of dry paint?! Yea... the pock marks were just bloody awful and showed up several times worse with a coat of "satin" black polyurethane on top. Next time I do this (yes, there will be a next time) I'll be coating that one with absurd amounts of thickly coated primer before I paint, and after I spackle any gouges/dents.

Today, over a month later.

That's just old watercolor paper underneath the sheet of acrylic. It rested a bit cockeyed too, so there's some sticking out of front of the plate, but only by like 1/16".

Cable management, though you can't see the plastic tubes and tie wraps, and my I-Pac2 VE keyboard encoder over pegs and screwed into the cab. A microswitch wired to the power button pins on the motherboard and a power strip aren't visible from here, and I didn't want to rotate the cab around to take pics.

The actual computer:
Intel E8500
2GB PC6400
1TB SATA HD
Radeon HD 5770
Biostar G31D-M7 (motherboard)
Apex TX-381-C (case)
XPx32 SP2/Vistax64 SP1
500W PSU (Antec I think...)

Bit much for a MAME cab? Yea, well, I knocked a glass of water on most of these components and later found out I only fried the motherboard after replacing everything. My main computer isn't on the floor near my desk anymore I'll have you know! Lesson learned in $400 or so of idiot tax.

The speakers are in the marquee area now, though the glass does dampen the audio more than the speaker grill in the top center of the screen area alone can compensate for. I need to ask around for where to get a replacement sheet of metal or even fabric speaker grill to both hide the speakers and let more sound through.

I just added this 1"x2" wood piece tonight; it's simply pinched in place by pressure, no glue, nails, or anything. While the pics don't show it at all, the arms are pinched inward and the control panel is made of metal and just thrashes and scratches at the paint on the sides. In fact, on double-triple inspect, I figured out that before the sides of the cab were stapled together (if screwed, I'd have fully dismantled it, but it wasn't) it was wall papered. I thought it was paint at first, but it scraped off wrong and the wood behind it had a shiny hardened glue which at this point I figure to be wallpaper glue and black wallpaper--more rookie mistakes. Lesson to anyone else: that stuff Atari used is damn strong and way more resilient than any paint. When I do another one I'll be sure looking into that as an option if it's financially feasible.

You might not be able to see any pock marks, but some are still there. Room is dark and it's late, so I had to crank the ISO on my camera and the grain might be hiding the detail I wanted shown.

Not art, but art related

2011-07-11T19:53:00.000-07:00

So I was at my usual coffee haunt last night, doing my doodle thing in my sketchbook. I was at an elevated counter on a stool facing a window to the street and some outside seating generally for smokers more than weather permitting--this is important at the end, take notes, kids. Anyway, I was mostly trying to panel out a 2-page idea and a 3-panel idea (that I can't seem to get lower than 4 panels) I had that sounded like good practice since my visual narrative skills are sub-par (read: not where I want them to be at my age) and I was being painfully scatterbrained and indecisive about it all night.

At the end of the night an older white guy with a shaved head (sure he could have been cue-ball bald...) walked up to the two people next to me, a darker-skinned guy with a short tightly-haired beard in what looked like a faux-military jacket that I forget the country of leaning against the counter, and the girl sitting at the end of the counter, a lean brunette with short hair and a few of those rings that cover the middle segment of the finger--these were particularly noteworthy because whenever she'd plop a hand down I'd hear a clank of her metal against the roofing copper that's used to cover the counters, and the nearly 3 hours I was there added up to a lot of clanking. The two guys had a brief chat, she was half in half out of it, and then the guy who had walked up noticed me doodling and asked to see what I'd just scribbled. I told him I'd just erased that disaster, but here, flip through the whole sketchbook, but be warned the first half is from 2005 (2006 actually, but I remembered wrong) which is why things change drastically mid-way. He liked that I was "boarding" a lot in the most recent pages, continually pleaded with me to stop being self-deprecatory, asked me about my goals and concerns: visual narrative, which I'm "wonky" at, to which he again pleaded with me to stop being self-deprecatory, then told me to learn through emulation (oddly the same thing my art and animation teachers have all told me) and told me to simply keep at it and be positive before walking off.

Despite now feeling bad that I'd used words he deemed too negative and self-defeating to the point he had to insist I stop (his brow even furrowed), having just a short chat like that sort of made my night better as a whole. Then a moment later his friend next to me (dark skinned, faux[?] military jacket) asks if I thought it was weird or odd for a guy to just walk up give me feedback like that, and I said something to the effect of "Nah, any critical feedback after college, let alone good? Do you know how hard that is to come by?", to which he and the girl both grinned at. It was interesting that a guy would walk up, flip through it, notice a few pages ask questions. Quite awesome really. So then he motions out the window and points to the guy who I'd just been talking to who was now sitting just on the other side of the window I'm facing and next to another regular, an older short Asian guy with salt and pepper hair and goatee who's always nose-deep into his large-screened laptop doing something that takes all of his focus at all times, and says "...[T]hose two are ex-Dreamworks and Pixar," though not saying which one was which. I think I was able to keep my shock down to my eyes only half bugging out of my face. The third guy's background is Hollywood, and the lot of them are looking to use their experience to get into working as an animation house for video game cinematics. Which makes sense since almost all games have both miserable dialogue and worse directing for non-interactive sequences. Cheers to them whoever they actually are... well I think the guy in the noteworthy jacket flirting/mingling with the girl next to me said his name, but I had 5 horrible hours of sleep that day, so I barely remember anything but what's written down here.

This post was originally about 1/5th this length. But then I got an itch to write it out in length because I can and I don't have an editor--if I did, all my "-ed" and "-ing" would be consistent.

MS Paint contests

2011-05-09T01:48:00.001-07:00

"MS Paint what you'd do if you had a Jetpack"

"MS Paint your OWN PERSONAL COUNTRIES [sic] CURRENCY"

Sometimes you don't want to take "art" seriously and doodle in MS Paint. And sometimes you've spent too goddamn much money on a fancy drawing tablet.

Both of these doodles were for web forum quick contests. "You have 1-hour to draw..." and the prizes were Steam games that were on sale for sub-$10. Sometimes you churn out a quick crappy cartoon just because it's fun and because not everything needs to be a masterpiece. Also it's good practice to slam out a quick composition.

AYYYYYYYYYYYYYYBRAH "MOTHERFUCKIN'" LINCOLN

2011-05-05T03:13:00.000-07:00

Do you think he'd still get elected?

I had that weird zombie-Lincoln face on my mind when I sat down with my coffee and sketchpad tonight. Took way too long to make this, but it was entertaining to do. The time was overspent guessworking the pose... a photo source would have been handy for speeding it up.

Usual method of red pencil, 2B, black smooth ballpoint, did a little blacking with a calligraphy pen (that's starting to dry out sadly), scanned it, tweaked the levels, filled in the rest of the black, and realized I outta digitally "inkwash" it just a touch with a transparent layer of grey. Sorta wish I'd used Painter's digital watercolor layer instead, but I didn't think of it till I started writing this.

Hobos

2011-05-03T19:08:00.001-07:00

Sketch I did at my usual cafe Wednesday last week. As with most doodles where I'm leaning back and getting jittery with a cup of coffee, it shifts between controlled and chaotic, and I screw up foot placement.

Key note to fellow people who like it kick back and doodle carelessly: remember to do depth checks to make sure the right limbs are in the front.

WIP - A Shack

2011-04-20T05:49:00.000-07:00

It's actually more challenging than you'd think to make a digital image that looks like non-digital media. Already lacking the surface texture, you need to tweak your tools and program(s) according to some approximate of what your eye think it's supposed to look like.

Wanting to do another quick animation, I needed a background. Then I realized I hadn't done any environmental drawing in too long, and never stressed it on myself in college--double whammy, so I got cracking at this. I probably drew 3 or 5 in my sketchbook before starting this, and this drawing has 6-8 layers for various generations, shading, and elements.

Yea, I'm that guy in your art class who re-did something to death, and might not have noticed a glaring problem while working on some minutia I wanted to get better at.

PS: To students of art: It's on your own shoulders to challenge yourself and vary your range of abilities. Especially since almost all upper-division art classes are "You have work due in 3-6 weeks, use your lab time to full effect, I'll be watching."

Quick Walk Cycle

2011-04-09T02:00:00.001-07:00

It's been a while since I did one of these, so thinking about it I found for myself a quick project to do tonight. Wasn't as quick as it should have been, nor is it polished at all, but it had to be done, and it was fun to do it.

It started as the standard 4-frame walk (contact, down, pass, up) before adding two more frames to make a 6-frame walk. Never drawn one before since all the basic exercises are the 4-frame. Plus it now makes the step 50% longer to take the same step.

Good exercise. I might throw in a bit more time on it in a day or two just because I should for practice and cleanliness.

Moustache Dog in Ink

2011-03-11T01:17:00.001-08:00

I was at a coffee shop reading a bit and trolling the intarwebs for something to draw from. I've gotta go somewhere once or twice a week to avoid the temptation of video games in my room. My scanning or Reddit's /r/pics found a mustachioed puppy that I added a few extra details to whilst I quickly doodled it out in pen and pencil. Had a lot of fun actually.

Link to original for as long as it lasts: http://imgur.com/gEC1V

Clay Head

2011-03-03T15:49:00.001-08:00

First of all, you'll see the scale. All of the sculpting was done with the hard end of that paint brush in the first few pictures--which wasn't easy for someone who's never really done any sculpting to memory. The clay is "Klean Klay"; not sure i it's cheap stuff or not, but I got 2 pounds of it for $5 at Utrecht around a month ago.

Second of all you'll see a dramatic shift in facial construction and that the ears I spent large amounts of time toying with are suddenly gone. I was drinking here with two friends and one of them, a girl by the name of Laura, who has a rather skilled hand at art, looked at my block head and pronounced she "could do it better!" And then proceeded to make my square-jawed cartoon character more realistic and without ears. My focus was on facial expression, so I was both impressed and annoyed at the same time. Due to the ears and the hardness of the clay at room temperature being in conflict anyway, I was far from butt-hurt.

About a week and half later (last night) I was looking at the now egg-shaped head and realized how I was to cope with the lack of ears. The head's new right ear changes when the lighting changes because it did not last the night. It was half fallen off when I woke, and it tore itself free by the time I was ready to take pictures.

So, yea, in retaliation to her alterations I gave him bunny ears and buck teeth.

In the future I will play with this stuff much more, but I'll definitely need some sort of support underneath, meaning I need to figure out what wire I can safely use as a skeleton.

Pick Your Battles

2011-02-23T01:24:00.000-08:00

Drawing I did in or just under an hour while "watching" (listening) a dialogue heavy movie.

Mato!!!

2011-02-13T21:54:00.000-08:00

I got my new tablet finally. Replaced by Wacom 12WX with a superior model.

Anyway, I had absolutely no idea what to draw on it. So, this was my get-used-to-the-new-toy! drawing.

Not Quite Goya's Ghost

2010-10-18T04:28:00.001-07:00

Originally I had just wanted to draw the face of this based on a love of circular white eyes and a scene from the old Evangelion series where one of the giant not-really-a-robots was drawn as a carnivorous silhouette with some color and two wild white circles for eyes.

As I sketched in the head and eyes, I progressed to the hands and then doodled in the body as quickly as I could... which probably called on my love of Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son" from my subconscious. Most of the anatomy issues were done on purpose, but a few happened because I blocked in shapes too quickly and didn't think about how they should fit together or contract and bunch up. It was an exercise in speed at first, then shadows second.

Also needing to play more with shadow, you can see spots where I simply wasn't sure what to block in and what to leave as white.

Loosely drawn in erasable red, then in 2B, loosely/wildly traced over in ballpoint, and finally blacked in with a felt Tombo calligraphy pen. It's done on cheap sketchpad paper, so I opted not to erase all of the pencil lines and cause a bunch of greyish areas where the paper always lifts up from vigorous erasing.

Drawing The Turtles

2010-09-30T05:03:00.000-07:00

Webcam on 10-second delay, played back at 30FPS.

The actual drawing. Photographed with my D40 on the same tripod.

Not the optimal setup and it seems prone to leaving parts not in the center out of focus as I don't quite match up the angles of the camera and drafting table as closely as it looks in the viewfinder.

Turtle. Yes, a Turtle.

2010-09-15T05:32:00.000-07:00

Source image

This guy takes up around half of another 18"x24" sheet of paper.

Vowing to draw something tonight, and someone randomly having mentioned turtles, I realized I hadn't tried drawing an at least semi-accurate turtle in... well probably ever. I hit up yonder Google image search and found many, many pictures of turtles. This one caught my eye though, which is unsurprising since it was National Geographic--love their photography I do, so much so I picked up that DVD set of everything of theirs until the early 2000s... and I never use it.

The reason there's no background to the image is that the photographer, or someone else in the publishing chain, digitally removed all of the environment. If you zoom in close enough you can see that the very outside pixels are transparent, and that it was probably cut/masked out with vectors in Photoshop or the like.

So I took some liberties with the drawing since my monitor and my drafting table face different walls, and I can only rotate the screen so much. Also I wanted to do a more desert-style of reptile scales because of a giant lizard in Geoff Darrow's Shaolin Cowboy series.

Photographed and color-dropped again. My scanner can't handle stuff this size, and the lamp by my table is on the left side, always blowing out the left side of the photos.

40# (I think) sketch paper, 2B and 6B pencil, various erasers.

A Bad Rip-Off

2010-09-14T22:54:00.000-07:00

The idea sort of came to me from a collection of photographs I picked up at a used book store a year or so ago, "Century" by Phaidon Press. It's 1,000+ pages (or photos, I forget) of photos from 1900-2000, mostly in black and white. On Page 414 is a woman in a gas mask and shall wandering what I think is a downtown area in a bombed-out Germany during WWI. No flames, just contrasty, eerie, and probably would give a hard-on to anyone big into industrial music and dress.

Anyway, the drawing has lots and lots of issues. This is what happens when you take a loose idea you're not sure how to just blatantly copy and end up sticking to one of the loose doodles. It didn't look all that good, so I turned it into a personal challenge to render the whole sheet of 18"x24" paper into a drawing with a background that made some sense as it had been since college that I tried that--also my backgrounds are still ignored more than a red-headed step-child, and that needs to stop. My indecisive nature didn't help, and I took way too long in it as well since every 30-60 minutes I'd utter a string of expletives and walk away to play video games for a few. Then return and change my mind about another aspect.

It was photographed with a tripod while it was still on my drafting table, which is part of why the lighting is off and why I greyscaled it since the halogen and the fluorescent lamps were fighting over the ambient color of the paper.

Biggie (tm) 40# paper pad, 2B, 4B, 5B, 6B pencils, a smudge stick, and some erasers.

Facebook to Panel

2010-08-20T00:30:00.000-07:00

This is based on a Facebook post that was much simpler and just involved yelling "I'm pooping" at some Jehova's Witnesses from wherever he lived in whatever room he was in. It wasn't a very long post obviously.

Anyway, I haven't been trying panel work as much as I want to, if at all. And ultimately it's one of the things I want to do. The art work is horribly inconsistent as I tried several different things to see which ones I liked, and working like this on 8.5"x11" paper meant working really small and that was aggravating in its own right.

Posted for posterity. And to mark me trying this shit out some more.

Cthulu Creates God

2010-07-20T15:07:00.001-07:00

Yea, yea, it's not perfect. I'm getting there...

Well, here's is my Cthulu drawing drawn back over in pen. Not much has changed here, and I'm considering painting over/under it digitally with dramatic light and shadow, maybe tenebrism, maybe less dramatic than that.

Character sheets

2010-07-19T17:57:00.000-07:00

Basically around the winter/spring transition of last year some friends wanted to start an iPhone app development house. I've got a fancy-shmancy degree in studio art, and I'll totally work on the cheap to pro bono if it pads my portfolio. I didn't intern in college and I need/want professional degrading at hands of demanding management.

While the animation for the elephant was completed late in the game due to project mishandling and mismanagement at the fault of multiple hands and my laziness, the project itself was 90%+ completed, and then abandoned for various reasons that aren't the fault of one, but of the many. Anyway, these are two character sheets, one of which isn't completed as one can identify by Toast Man not having a shaded or colored 3/4 angle.

Done purely digitally back and forth between Painter and Photoshop.

The South Shall Rise Again!

2010-07-17T00:38:00.001-07:00

This actually started out on a picnic table at Bullards Bar Reservoir around 10 days ago. I was trying to think of what to draw and possibly having an early afternoon beer at the time. A buddy of mine started listing off random things and the ones that stuck somehow built the image of the Great Southern Uprising on dinosaurs and with lasers. If I was in fact drinking a beer, I was less than half of a bottle in to the day, so it wasn't drunken stupidity/genius that inspired me.

I wasn't sure where I was going with this outside of wanting a drab brown landscape with some colors on top in watercolor, so I kept adding elements of an environment to the drawing as I went. That's also why I scanned it three times, so I could always take a step back and finish it off purely digitally if I fucked it up too much. So far I like the results that I can see... but I'm red/green colorblind, so I honestly have no idea what it truly looks like.

The anatomy needs work, as usual, but as a whole I see it as a step in the right direction for myself. Especially since I used no photo sources for anything until late in the re-penciling stage to see what a velociraptor actually (sort of) looked like. The errors with the rider are my own damn fault and that I didn't want to go back and re-draw half of him. His left hand also contains some inking errors that looked better when it was pencil. Lessons learned the hard way...

Usual process: erasable red pencil, 2B graphite sketch finalizing, 02 black Micron lines, detail in 005, 05, and 08. Real watercolors NOT with the pencils this time, screw those things if I'm not on the road. I dug up my actual watercolor tubes and an old mixing tray I've had since about 2001.

Following his advice!

2010-07-08T01:25:00.000-07:00

Okay, Monday of this week started out with at least 3 Cthulhu references, and then someone made a crack about whether I had desires to depict him, as he called out to artists. I've yet to read the book--oh, but I will soon I hope--so I assumed this was part of the mythos. Well I hadn't any desire at the time, but later that night while hanging out with a buddy I finally got an idea for how to depict the Great Old One. Anatomy is far from perfect, but it's good practice to tinker with classical themes. So you should too.

Red eraseable pencil followed by 2B, scanned with the red dropped out. Will likely ink it, or try to, after a few more changes to the two touching hands and the area around that.

Week of 2010.06.25

2010-07-05T01:43:00.000-07:00

My first pencil/pen/watercolor tests on the watercolor pad. While being pre-posted before the completed robot, it's actually being written after.

So, these are my first attempts to play with the watercolor pencils, and they didn't at all work how I expected in a relation of amount:intensity ratio. The blurry grey smudges on the one with the eye-flare are the result of a non-waterproof ink to see if/how it would work as an inkwash. I wasn't put off by the results, but I thought it would bleed a lot more and not leave lines behind like that.

Overall I like the not-really-complete doodles, but dislike most traits of the watercolor pencils. So not much changed after I did the play-doh colored robot, though I did get a mildly better grasp on controlling it.

The Monster

2010-07-05T01:41:00.000-07:00

Was hanging out at a friend's place and I think Young Frankenstein was mentioned somewhere along the evening. Doing what I usually do, bucking social standards, I grabbed my sketch pad and went to town drawing the old guy in trusty 'ol red erasable pencil. Proceeded to add the monster with a head in hand and draw an environment around them. So, yes, this was a poorly planned scribble. Along the way I realized I needed more blood and Eyegor somewhere in it. Again, poorly planned. No line width variance because the pen I used is, as I've mentioned before, an extra fine .5MM ballpoint that doesn't bleed. It's steady like a large inanimate object or someone still on the wagon.

Then the usual 2B followed by ball point black, non-waterproof.

I am aware that the doctor wasn't that old in either the original or parody, I just really wanted to draw a cane and monocle.

Play-Doh colored robot

2010-07-05T01:37:00.001-07:00

Well, the watercolor pencils I wanted to tinker with ended up like this.

Mixing them is a complete pain the ass, and so is sharpening them on the go. The best way to do it is with a cylindrical cutter/planetary sharpener with two conical gears that shave off the material. If you're old enough, you'll recall them having hand cranks in elementary school and being about mid-thigh height compared to the adults.

So, the drawing didn't change too much from my previous scan, but the color from the pencils only had the option of intense. The yellow went from faint yellow stain to yellow overwhelming blob while the red and browns mostly stayed as lines on the paper and barely bled out or even moved. The blues were more forgiving and probably were inbetween the other colors in terms of the pigment's hardness. So are they worthless? Not really. Are they useful? Barely, but yes. Good for an experiment in the middle of nowhere, or at a coffee shop, where I like to do my drawing.

Another Unfinished Robot

2010-07-02T06:41:00.001-07:00

I've been playing with a pad of 90# cold press watercolor paper for the sake of mixed media work. Nothing against my beloved (and cheapo) 50# sketchpad, that's 10# lighter than most sketchpads, but it doesn't handle liquid at all. In fact 90# barely does either. I argue that 150# is a very nice baseline for any watercolor/ink wash, and that still buckles if you do any full-page washes.

The point of this new pad is also to convince myself to do more complete drawings so I can finally move closer to work I'd merrily put into a portfolio. So far it's not really working, but we'll see.

The evolution of this drawing was a loose idea hacked in with my trust erasable red pencil that became my sidekick in animation, my staple 2B graphite, and then black Micron 03 with 02 and 05 to touch up after. For the record, Microns are amazing pens with two problems: 1) no line width; these babies are consistent and stalwartly the size they're marked as, and 2) if you fail to get that last little click on the pen, that baby's gonna draw out dead right quick. #1 can be your ally actually, but I'm a big fan of line width variation within a single line, and they don't bleed at all, which makes up for any problems I might have with them.

Anyway, as you can see I ran into some issues with my drawing. Downside of not using any photo reference at all is that sometimes you don't take enough time to consider the mass of an object and have elements clip through each other or not match perspective. In this case, the left knee joint is sort of impossibly wrong and even the white out isn't helping much. Oh well, still gonna finish it up the ink later today and play with my watercolor pencils for some color testing and to inch closer to a decision if I like watercolor pencils or if they're a joke and a waste of my money.

There are a few more drawings from the past 1.5 weeks that haven't been scanned yet, but this one needed to be archived before anything else got fucked up in process of completion.

Week of 2010.06.18

2010-06-19T04:43:00.001-07:00

The week in doodles for me. Only 3-pages worth of scribbles, and another 1-page drawing that's only very roughly laid out as an idea, in fact so lightly laid out that I didn't bother scanning it.

The first image is one I want to play with more, while the rest are loose ideas to relax the fingers and wrist so that I might get to the point with my pencil instead of spending too long trying to salvage a bad idea. I started the 2nd image with the handlebar mustached fellow, and spent far too long scribbling on and around the idea. Bad warm up practice, as those should always be fast and loose, like that Motorhead song.

As a fun note, the top of the 3rd page has an issue where I forgot which leg was which and, well, it's obviously fucked up; you can see where I noticed something wrong and just lifted my pencil away from it and moved on.

Unfinished Robot

2010-06-17T02:46:00.000-07:00

See that faint image behind the black lines? That was a rather fun pencil doodle to make. Ignored most perspective cues as a whole to focus on the giant robot in the middle, and then on the one to the right. The rest of it was loosely guided by where the vanishing point had sort of started, but was done freehand and with very little consistency.

So why is it incomplete? Took a photo of it, dragged it into Painter and couldn't decide what to do with it once I got all the angles and everything where I wanted them. The whole idea just fell apart over the course of a day or two and got tossed aside for better-planned ideas. Or maybe to try again someday.

Dragon

2010-06-10T05:02:00.001-07:00

Drawing of a dragon I was doodling in my sketchbook a week or two ago. Erasable red pencil, 2B graphite, and black ball point.

The intentional was to try and return to a more cartoony style since as of late I've been trying to make stuff realistic without much or any photo reference, which is really bloody hard for me and has resulted in some iffy drawings and oddball anatomy screw-ups where some stuff looks fine and others are just wrong.

Also I was wasn't really thinking about it and totally screwed up a few things on the dragon, most notably the stomach. I'm going to attempt a touch-up of that area on my tablet later today.

Got a new scanner, an Epson V500, and I finally tried it out. Normal scans are damn quick to me since I'm used to a 10-year-old Canon 1240U. This one is advertised as being for photo scanning first, but of that I only care about this awesome option for dropping a single color spectrum. The scan takes twice as long, but I will almost completely ignore the red erasable pencil I've started drawings with since my last animation class. It's a silly thing to enjoy, but it's awesome compared to what I'm used to.

Pow.

2010-05-26T18:59:00.000-07:00

Oh wait, two more. I'll post this now, the other later on.

Okay, so my all-time favorite hyper-detailed artist is Geof Darrow. There are lots of amazing comic artists and animators out there with all sorts of amazing styles. But when I want to read a hyper-detail comic without the art feeling cluttered and without focus, he is a god among peons.

The result is that every so often I take another shot at drawing what I imagine a high-speed camera would capture in whatever situation is crossing my mind at the time. And for this drawing, started around 2 weeks ago, I had zombies, proper anatomy, and Darrow's Shaolin Cowboy on my mind. Specifically the 3rd panel of this page is what I was thinking of.

So I went about free-handing the drawing, going back and forth between two anatomy books and cursing to myself for a few days on and off while trying to remember how to draw. It's amazing how much one can forget. Or has to re-learn when working on a drawing tablet. In my case a nasty mess of both.

Lessons learned:
- I still can't do hair very well and try to draw everyone bald
- There are a lot of muscles I forget about
- Freehanding everything is a lot harder than I recall. I should use more photo references
- It's hard to imagine gore in 3D when drawing. I spent way too long just imagining the result of and thinking "If this part is shot off, and these muscles are exposed, and these bones are shattered... would it be skull, vertebrae, or brains exposed here. And where would the jugular go?"

That last one is a paraphrase of a real thought.

Random Panda

2010-05-26T18:33:00.000-07:00

These have all been cross-posted to my Deviant Art account too. But I don't bother to write as much there.

Out of ideas just a week ago from today I went about sifting through my gigantic folder of random images I've collected from Ye Olde Internet. It's a giant folder of random source images I've found via Google Image Search (GIS), memes from 4chan, links from Reddit, so on and so forth. It runs the gamut of horribly inappropriate humor to endearing to pics pilfered from National Geographic and The Boston Globe. You'd be amazed what can be a handy source image or inspirational in a rut.

Strangely, of all those to flip though a drawing of a panda in basically a split of a Shinto monk's clothing and Usagi Yojimbo's outfit stood out to me. But so did the sumi-e calligraphy tools in Painter, of which I simply could not get a fine painterly line from. Also, being a simulated art tool set and not real, I couldn't just let it dry and then angle it on a table and gently go over with a very wet watercolor brush to get runs and blooms of ink on it. Instead I settled for a water color layer in black and looked back over my shoulder to my drafting table and considered returning to it.

This was never meant to be an intricate drawing, but the digital tools don't work quite in line with my on/off watercoloring for the past decade, so I eventually gave up making it look how I imagined it (which, honestly, involved the crinkling sound of thin paper, so I was doomed from the start) and spent more time adjust layer transparencies and brush settings than I did actually drawing it. In fact it was meant to be a a minimalist ink drawing more in line with... [randomly searches GIS] this than what it came out as. Oh well, live and learn to manipulate the software for another day.

That's it for now. I'm not sure what else is on hand for publishing here at the moment.

Evening Goo... or something

2010-05-26T18:23:00.000-07:00

Anyone else's opinion aside, my take on this is as follows: A mix of a watercolor layer, a layer with a pencil/pen tool, and disaster.

Overall it's a take on a pencil/pen drawing I did in my sketchbook. One of a very few I finished in my sketchbook over the most recent long period of inactivity present in this blog. The original drawing was my personal favorite combination of black ink over pencil layout. Problem was the sense of perspective was non-existent and it fell flat and looked dull.

While I feel I did a better job with the composition and the brick walls, I honestly can't stand anything else about this. Lessons learned about color theory and getting used to working completely digital I hope. Also digital coloring is hard to tone down with complimentary colors; everything is still coming out as a high-intensity blob of color. Nevermind my red/green colorblindness kicking me in the pants... I'll find a way to at least partially overcome it yet.

On to more backlog posting...

Arid

2010-05-26T18:08:00.000-07:00

Returning to this blog since it's been too long. The point of this was for it to function as both a portfolio and a way for me to keep myself drawing. That both has and hasn't been the case. Also helps that my last post was from right before I took my last job as a night-shift forklift driver.

My gradual return to Painter

While I carried my sketchpad with me to work for the 19 or so weeks I was at the forklifting job, I never really finished anything I started. Nothing but loose doodles as I got rustier and rustier over time. This drawing is one of the few I've taken to what I felt was a completion or stopping point for what it was. Originally it was just a loose scribble in a stack of unrelated layers to chronicle the day's drawing, but the forced perspective turned out to be a real pain in the backside for me since I hadn't done it in a while. That alone caused me to casually spend a handful of days staring at it and eventually taking it to where it is as a forced exercise to just stop the universe and troubleshoot my drawing memory.

While I wouldn't call it a resounding success or anything, it did feel good to work on it regardless of how long it took.

Random Painting #1

2009-10-18T03:57:00.000-07:00

While I'd rather title this "NUCLEAR CHICKEN/COCK", it's a random digital painting I did back in March of this year for a draw daily thread on a forum. Not sure how long I spent on it, but the legs make me think I was watching a lot of Futurama at the time.

Minimal as it is, the background still shows more purpose than some of my earlier works, an ongoing struggle of mine caused by being a character doodler first, painter/illustrator second.

That's it for tonight. This dilapidated blog has just been given a handful more updates, in burst form as usual, but hopefully I can start updating this thing weekly or bi-weekly.

2009-10-18T03:49:00.000-07:00

A digital painting that's dated late September '08. The painting went through a series of problems and successes, as can be seen by the guy in front, who doesn't look half bad, and the guy behind him, who looks more like a rigid joke. This piece is important because it was my first post-college painting that really highlighted my need to think through my environments better. You'd think that this would be something I wouldn't want to show off, but really, I find the opposite effect.

Truth be told, even "Random Drawing #4"'s environment needs work, but that one, admittedly and sadly, wasn't an afterthought.

Pixel Monkey

2009-10-18T03:22:00.001-07:00

A friend wanted a company logo for a side-project of his, and he was fixated on the following citeria: 1 monkey, 1 apple and 2 sandbags. Preferably with said monkey sitting on the sandbags. The bite taken out might not have been a requirement, but I ran with it from the get-go.

It took me a week or scribbling on my tablet and in my sketchbook to even angle myself towards putting the elements together into something cohesive. I even spent a few hours just searching over Google images for pictures of monkeys and chimps while trying to decide what to do.

T-Shirt stencil

2009-10-18T02:54:00.001-07:00

A little over a week ago I decided I wanted to try stenciling, and spent an evening flipping through my old sketchbooks trying to find an image that was thought out enough that I'd be able to re-draw it digitally and vectorize it instead of starting from scratch and having to spend even longer figuring out the light/dark details. Early on the original drawing (not pictured) popped into mind. It then took me 30-60 minutes to find which sketchbook it was in, since I couldn't remember what year it was originally done (SP06), or where over half of my sketchbooks were (garage in a filing cabinet). I spent about a day re-drawing, polishing and vectorizing the original into the above. Then I got some feedback from some friends, most of which liked it, but changed it to below when two friends had very strong opinions about not liking the simplistic background.

This became the final design when I realized the bullet holes looked better as snow, and that the black background was more dramatic. As you can see two sheets were used: 1 for the guy, and 1 for the snow/breath. Here's the first printing of the stencil on 25lb. normal printer paper--something I will never use again, it barely avoided melting when it got wet. The slipping of the registration was actually caused by the whole issue with the paper nearly melting.

Run for the Billions

2009-10-18T02:35:00.001-07:00

Requested logo for a programming project for someone I know on EFnet. He didn't want a total rip-off of the Monopoly mascot, but he did was it to be inspired by that visual aesthetic.

This is actually not the version I submitted to him just over a year ago. That one is as follows:

You can see that the "RUN" is emphasized instead, and that was a grave mistake on my part and solely based on not wanting to warp "BILLIONS" at the time.

Thinking about whether or not it was used, I'm quite sure I actually missed his submittal deadline by nearly a whole hour. So here's a tip: if your pro bono logo artist does everything last second, don't figure that the artist will do the piece any sooner if you refuse to say when the deadline is and assume this will make he or she take it as initiative to do it hours or even days sooner.

Random Drawing #4

2009-10-18T02:21:00.001-07:00

Drawing done mostly at a coffee shop. 2B pencil, .5mm black ballpoint pen (non-waterproof) on 9x12 60lb. sketchpad. The rough pose of the character had been done a week or two prior, but was tossed aside until earlier when I was at a coffee shop and itching to do some cross-hatching. No rulers, just an eraser pencil to guide the edges of the light beams, which is why the rest of the lines drift and change angles so much.

Photographed, 256-greyscaled and brightness/contrast adjusted.

(Was photographed because my now-ancient scanner has no Win7 drivers.)

"Ahead of it All"

2009-10-02T17:57:00.001-07:00

A self-portrait painted digitally. Done achromatically, the second image is the color overlay used on it. While the second layer looks far from refined on its own, I still like the look of it and posted it along with.

Fish Edit

2009-07-02T07:28:00.000-07:00

If you've used any of the Windows 7 RC's, then you'll recognize the image immediately as an edit of the default background. Alright, so fancy as the original is, it's too bright for my eyes as a background, and of the images packed with the OS, it's the only one I liked.

Rather than look around for a replacement image, or an idea to create one with, I opted to abuse filters, layer modes, and quick masks with it because I honestly do like it, but needed a darker image. Little projects like these are great excuses to mess around with tools you want more practice with. At the most basic it's an inverted color scheme with a quickmask to pluck some of the fish's highlights since the fish looked downright ugly when completely inverted.

I can't credit the original image's author because I have no idea who it was.

Random Drawing #3

2009-06-02T18:49:00.000-07:00

Done in my sketchpad while hanging out at a coffee shop. I just really wanted to draw a fat monster who was tired of it all, then doodled the rest around that idea.

The Girl Gets the Bird

2009-06-01T00:03:00.000-07:00

This started out, and essentially still is, as a response to an acmeanimaton.org challenge. That challenge was to have a girl (the age of 8-10) walk onscreen, find a dead bird, emote, walk to and pick it up, emote more, have the bird wake up and fly off, then have her emote as it ended. All within 30 seconds or less.

Playing with narrative I wound up getting it closer to 90 seconds in length, taking nearly 4 months of work, and close to a whole ream of paper. The very last of the animation being done digitally over the scans.

There is no audio at the moment, I'm considering consulting some friends about changing that.

Vectorized Self

2009-05-27T22:20:00.001-07:00

The photo itself was taken by a friend of mine, Lee Kauftheil, with an infrared modified Nikon DSLR camera and a fish-eye lens. Vector traced by me between Photoshop and Illustrator CS3.

Random Drawing #2

2009-05-25T14:58:00.001-07:00

At my last office job they had these slick uni-ball pens with a nice flow that cross-hatch in a way that reminded me of printmaking. This drawing was after I finally tracked down a box of them to play with.

They worked fine, but aren't waterproof. So word to the wise: I got lucky this time (not a few others), but remember to be careful about condensation on your glass/bottle when drawing with non-waterproof inks.

Random Drawing #1

2009-05-25T14:55:00.001-07:00

Name is literal. It's a random drawing on a small piece illustration board. 2H/2B pencil and some black Micron pens.

Hulk's Coffee

2009-05-25T14:51:00.001-07:00

If you can ignore the scale, you don't realize that's probably a 5 gallon cup of coffee. Except that I just I just told you of course.

Unholy Trinity

2009-05-25T14:34:00.000-07:00

Yes, the name is a tacky pun on Masaccio's famous Renaissance painting "Holy Trinity", which must have seemed very clever to me 3-4 years ago. The final drawing is about the 3rd generation, drawn over layers of tracing paper for an intaglio project.

(Another preliminary drawing for the same project)

Steampunk Doodle

2009-05-24T13:53:00.000-07:00

Taken from the olde sketchbook of random ideas with a dash of internet pop-culture.

Another piece from my tracing paper phase where I'd develop a drawing 3-4 times in pencil. Finding it a waste of not-that-cheap paper I couldn't ink very well, I wound up going back to 60lb sketch pads, 2B/4B pencils, Micron pens, and a scanner.

Alteration by Generation

2009-05-24T13:27:00.001-07:00

The first painting was an experiment in landscape work. The source was a photo of an abandoned factory with some Photoshop work to blow the too-middled contrast. The composition wound up working as a photo, but being a miss on canvas, so the second one was made in response to that outcome and a desire for surrealism to pull further away from the source.

A third one was always, and still is, planned, but the one to three work break from the same subject has stretched out indefinitely so far.

2009 Calendar

2009-05-24T13:06:00.001-07:00

Calendar project done in Illustrator. While a fun experiment for making 12 themed images, these are my favorite of those.

The inspirations came all across the board from comic books and a hybrid of Richard Amsel's "Barry Lyndon" poster and Saul Bass' poster for "The Man with the Golden Arm"--the latter seemingly a favorite of every design student to emulate at least once in their life.

The Chin

2009-05-24T12:53:00.000-07:00

Pencil sketch plan for an unfinished vector piece. Worked better as a pencil drawing, so it's been on the back burner for about three years now.

Two Trees

2009-05-24T12:45:00.000-07:00

A painting commissioned by a friend. The pencil sketch and the final image ended up being rotated different ways when displayed, though a clear one wasn't intended. Other elements were then altered when he needed it sanitized if he displayed it at work (he ended up not) and by me when color temperature was introduced.

Drawing: 8.5"x11", pencil on paper
Painting: 24"x48", oils on gessoed hardboard

Rock and confusion

2009-05-24T12:41:00.001-07:00

After re-reading Frank Miller and Geof Darrow's Hard Boiled, I took a shot at capturing Darrow's style of blending frozen time with visible momentum.

Runner up business card

2009-05-24T12:38:00.000-07:00

I designed a few smiley guys for the business card, this was the runner up. It was free-handed in Illustrator without any tracing. Not that that isn't obvious with the odd shapes, but still worth noting.

Melting

2009-05-24T12:34:00.000-07:00

Pencil sketch shot at surrealism.

2B and 4B pencil mostly, probably some 6B at the end. Drawn on a 60lb. 9x12 sketchpad. Scanned, greyscaled and brightness/contrast adjusted.

Business card

2009-05-24T12:19:00.000-07:00

A business card I designed for myself back in '07.

Manny Calavera Collage

2009-05-21T19:41:00.000-07:00

This is a digital collage used as a template for a photo etching project. The printed form is around 6"x9" and colored with watercolor

Was displayed in SFSU's judged Stillwell show, FA06.

Mega Man

2009-05-21T19:33:00.000-07:00

My parody of the box art for the US version of Mega Man by Capcom.